Let's discuss privacy settings in the most popular social network around the world - Facebook. As in other chapters, we remove accessibility and, if possible, set maximum levels, commenting on their purpose and associated risks.
To begin with, let's analyze the privacy levels that Facebook allows you to set for your information and publications.
- Available to everyone / All - information will be seen by all Facebook users, and all Internet access will be open to search engines.
- Friends - only your friends will see the information.
- Only me - the information will be displayed only to you. Maximum privacy!
- User Settings - Flexible customizable list of who can and who can't see the information. Both individuals and categories of "Friends" and "Friends of Friends" are available.
Also for "Friends and Subscriptions" there are additional visibility levels of "Friends other than..." and "Certain Friends", which are variants of the latter.
Important note: The "Friends" level suggests that you can trust this group of people more, but do not underestimate the possibilities of social engineering. You can confirm the request to add a friend of a person similar to your friend without much hesitation. Which in fact will not turn out to be such, but will be added solely for the sake of obtaining your private information.
Go to the section "Settings and privacy" => "Quick privacy settings". We open the first card "Who can see your publications" and sequentially disassemble the screens with settings.
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Email address and Date of birth - in fact, these data identify us, we put Only me.
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Hometown and City of residence - if they differ, then third parties can easily link information about you in your youth/before moving with current information. In this case, it is also recommended to put Only me.
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Education - similar to the previous paragraph (this information may be issued by your native).
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Work - usually does not represent a secret if it is a public work. Depends on your situation.
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Who can see the friends list in your profile? and Who can see the people, Pages, and lists you subscribe to? - information about the social graph potentially makes it possible to learn a lot about you from the above indirectly. Surely you have friends and colleagues, and classmates, and classmates. Therefore, we also put "Only me".
- Future posts - determines which value will be set by default for new posts. Allows you to avoid accidentally publishing a post with incorrect privacy settings. It is recommended to set "Friends".
- Stories - they are visible only 24 hours, but not only on Facebook, but also in Messenger. We do not neglect the risks of finding out information about us through another platform, so we put up "Friends".
- Restrict access to old publications - important setting, which makes it possible to massively change the visibility settings for all old publications. Click "Restrict access" and confirm your decision.
In this section, you can add people to the blacklist. This is not our goal right now, but if you are concerned about privacy, knowing about a specific suspicious profile, block it here.
This section in the "Quick Privacy Settings" is very important to us - it allows you to "break the connection" between your phone and mail and account.
As mentioned above, the addition can be initiated only in order to see your private data.
Both settings are set to "All". This means that you can be found by phone number and email address via the built-in Facebook search! Of course, we put "Only me".
This setting is enabled by default and allows indexing of your profile. Turn it off and thereby prohibit finding our profile in search results by name Google, Yandex, etc.